8-9 December – Steppe Road: Mongolia’s Connectivity in Eurasia: an International Symposium

Steppe Road: Mongolia’s Connectivity in Eurasia

8-9 December 2015

In September 2014, upon Mongolia’s initiative, heads of state of Mongolia, China and Russia met during the SCO Summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan and agreed to work together on transnational infrastructure development. The three parties agreed in principle to build a ‘Steppe Road’ in Mongolia, reviving a pre-modern transport network that facilitated trade between China and Russia. ‘Steppe Road’ thus represents a breakthrough in Mongolia’s longstanding self-perception of tragic geography, stepping out into the centre of the emergent world traffic.

This international symposium will bring together Mongolian and international scholars and policy-makers to assess the development of Steppe Road in relation to the Chinese initiative of Silk Road Economic Belt, and Russia’s Eurasian Transport Network. We aim to reconceptualise Mongolia’s geopoliticality as a ‘transit nation’ between China and Russia, and promote Mongolia’s zam sudlal (‘roadology’) to make zam (‘road’) into both an object of study and a prism to view Mongolia in terms of Mongolia’s ‘connectivity’ to its neighbours and the world beyond. This is going to be the third (and last) conference of ‘Entangled Lines: Railways, Resource Booms, and Transnational Politics in Mongolia’ — a British Academy funded international network and mobility project between the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (Cambridge University), and Institute of International Affairs (Mongolian Academy of Sciences).